Prehistoric Park: the hadrosaurs
by bhut
Summary: Nigel goes back to North America, 75 MYA in the past, to learn more about the Troodon. A couple of hadrosaurs give him a very different sort of knowledge - as well as for the rest of the Prehistoric Park, and Matilda the T-Rex.


**Prehistoric Park: the hadrosaurs**

 _Disclaimer: none of the characters are mine, but belong to Impossible Pictures™._

 _Note: this is a sequel to my previous story, "Permian". It ought to be read for better understanding of what is going on here._

It was morning in the Prehistoric Park, and while most of its animal inhabitants were at peace, some of its' human staff were not.

"The Troodon and his new Pliocene 'friend' are getting to be something of a nuisance," Bob commented to Nigel as the pair examined the damage that the theropod and the terror bird had wreaked last night – dishevelled and upturned trash bins and the like. A certain smell indicated that 'the like' probably included a dead racoon or two – neither the terror bird nor the Troodon enjoyed _live_ competition, it seemed, but they certainly enjoyed eating them.

"They certainly make an interesting team," Nigel mused. "Both are about equally smart, even if the Troodon is slightly smarter than the terror bird is. The terror bird, however, is somewhat bigger and stronger than the dinosaur is, so they balance out."

"The dinosaur has _hands_ ," Bob pointed out, not unreasonably.

"The arms and hands of the theropods weren't as pronated or mobile as ours are, Bob," Nigel shook his head, "plus the terror bird has those smallish claws on its wings, so they aren't too different in this aspect either. No, I reckon the proper way to figure out how to deal with them is to go into the past and see how those animals behave in the wild. I actually have a fairly good idea of how to deal with the terror bird, so…I will start with the Troodon instead."

"Of course you will," Bob nodded, resigned. "Good luck!"

And Nigel was off and away – to the late Cretaceous North America...

/ / /

"Whoa!" the owner (and a time explorer) of the Prehistoric Park told his people, "I guess this time we didn't just go back in time, we went back in time, from a morning into late night, as you can see. The moon hasn't set yet, there is no morning chorus, for there are no birds in the modern meaning of the word per se, but for the dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes, this is one of the peak points of their daily slash nightly activity, just as it is for the modern animals…" he pointed to a mixed her of grazing dinosaurs, which were keeping an eye on him and his crew, but largely ignoring him, since the humans didn't smell dangerous to them – any of them, for the herd was mixed, made out of several species of dinosaurs. There were horned dinosaurs of some species, smaller than Theo and Theodora, Prehistoric Park's resident Triceratops, were, with very different heads – they were currently sticking to the trees and shrubs, striping them bare with their beaks: they were smaller than the Triceratops were, (somewhat), but their heads were proportionally more massive than those of the Triceratops.

There were the canonical duck-billed dinosaurs, which were grazing on the more open ground, trotting on two legs as well as on all four. They did not look as massive as the horned dinosaurs, but were still very powerful (and heavy) beasts. Some of the male duckbills were participating in contests of strength, showing off their size and strength to each other by standing upright on their hind legs and smashing their front legs against the ground. The females were feigning disinterest, but were still checking the males out slyly, for the mating season was coming soon enough.

Finally, there were the smallest of the plant-eaters – some sort of a bipedal herbivore that was running around the duckbilled and horned dinosaurs and eating their scraps, while keeping a respectful distance from them – especially the contesting males…just in case.

"Now, there are the duckbilled hadrosaurs, they are the ones who are showing off," Nigel continued, thoughtfully, "the smallest ones are ornithopods of some sort – this sort of plant-eating dinosaur was the first to go by the end of the Mesozoic – and the horned ones… wait, let me see their horns…"

Feeling surprisingly obliging for some reason, one of the horned dinosaurs raised its head and gazed – briefly – at Nigel, before beginning to strip a nearby coniferous shrub off its needles, its single nasal horn thrust forwards like some sort of a giant hook. (Unlike a Triceratops, it did not have any brow horns, but its nasal horn was quite big and intimidating looking instead.)

"This is an Einiosaurus," Nigel nodded smugly. "It is related to our Triceratops, but only distantly: it is actually a member of another branch of the horned dinosaur family tree, but it certainly behaves as the Triceratops does, does it not?"

The Einiosaurus (the one that Nigel had been looking at), gave Nigel a disinterested look…and then it, apparently, saw something else beyond Nigel and his people, as it made a grunt of alarm and quickly trotted back over to its herd. The rest of the horned dinosaurs quickly began to form some sort of a protective circle, their heads, horned (or hooked) and frilled facing outwards, with their vulnerable calves safely within the adults' protection.

The other plant-eaters had noticed the change in the einiosaurs' behavior, but it was too late, for even as the einiosaurs were making their defence, the meat-eaters arrived, bursting onto the scene like crazy kangaroos of some sort, out of the shrub cover, some dull and drab brown, others more colorful and striped.

Immediately, chaos reigned, as the other plant-eating dinosaurs, the hadrosaurs and the ornithopods, scattered, trying to protect themselves from the wicked teeth and curved claws of the newcomers… and a pair of them, a medium-sized (by dinosaur standards) female and a larger male, fled into Nigel's time portal.

"Oh damn," Nigel muttered, as he and his crew followed the hadrosaurs to minimize the damage. As he did, he looked back one last time, and saw that the pack of the local Troodons had brought down a couple of the ornithopods and were busy tearing into them…

/ / /

Back in the present, in the Prehistoric Park, Matilda the T-Rex was not having a very good time lately. Ever since her brother Terrence had team-up with another male Tyrannosaurus, she was no longer able to bully him as she had before: the two males were smaller than she was, but there were two of them, and only one of her…

Therefore, when she bust out _this_ time, (between her size, strength and weight, she was able to break through the new fence too), she did not go towards the other tyrannosaurs, but just wandered off elsewhere, to a point in the Park where it smelled good – to a T-Rex.

And indeed, there was such a spot in the Park: the place where the resident sauropods had buried their latest clutch. Not too surprisingly, the Troodon and the terror bird had discovered them. On their own, they would not have done anything: neither of them had any idea what to do with the sauropod eggs, as the sauropods came from another time and place than the Troodon and the terror bird did, but their chittering had attracted a smarter predator: the Thylacoleo. Unlike the Troodon and the terror bird, whose method of escape remained unknown to Bob and his people, the marsupial lion escaped in a straightforward way: it knew how to climb and to leap over a fence, and this was what it had done several times by now, whenever it got bored in its enclosure. Unlike the Troodon and the terror bird, it was a loner, but it did not seem interested in bothering people…and it would, on occasion, follow them just to see what was going on here.

…In this particular case, 'here' meant a payload of sauropod eggs…and unlike the terror bird or the Troodon, the marsupial lion had an idea what to do about them: it dug one of them out, and then, using its powerful teeth, it broken through the shell and began to feed. The Troodon and the terror bird exchanged some sort of a look between each other, and then they dug another egg and broke it, and began to feast: it was large enough for both of them – too large for the marsupial lion to finish on its own – and the broken eggs smelled interestingly enough for Matilda the T-Rex to go and check them out.

Now, Matilda was already big enough and adult enough _not_ to be interested in eggs, even sauropod eggs, (unlike any potential hatchlings), but as fate would go, her path took her through the pad where Nigel's time portal would open in the Park, and right now it had brought forth a couple of hadrosaurs.

There was a pause as Matilda and the hadrosaurs examined each other. The smaller hadrosaur female moved backwards, but her male companion moved forwards and did the 'stand-up' routine once more, showing off his size, strength and physical fitness to the predator. The hadrosaurs in question were maiasauras; they came from a time when T-Rex wasn't yet around in North America, but its relatives, the Albertasaurus, the Gorgosaurus, and especially the Daspletosaurus, were – and the main difference between them, (especially the Daspletosaurus), and a T-Rex was size, and right now, Matilda wasn't a full-grown T-Rex either…nor did she have any experience how to hunt hadrosaurs in the wild. The hadrosaurs, (and especially the male), on the other hand, knew what to do about a young and unexperienced tyrannosaur that decided to charge them instead.

Make no mistake, Matilda was still a T-Rex with a potentially deadly, bone-crushing bite, and if she had made one good strike, first…she would have won, period. However, the Maiasaura male knew this too, and as Matilda came into a striking distance, he pivoted on his back legs, taking his vulnerable head and neck out of danger, and slamming his heavy tail into Matilda's leg and side.

The resulting clap even _sounded_ nasty, and then the hadrosaur reversed his pivot, slamming his forequarters into Matilda's torso in an upwards blow.

Weight mattered. Pound for pound, the hadrosaur and Matilda were currently the same size, but the hadrosaur was heavier and relatively stronger than Matilda was (at the moment), so his blow lifted the young adult Tyrannosaurus off her feet and threw her down.

And then the hadrosaur pressed his advantage by standing upwards and slamming his front legs into the downed carnivore's side several times, clearly hurting her as Matilda's pained screeches showed – and they were answered by the Deinosuchus' bellow. The Maiasaura had never encountered a giant crocodile in their mountain home of late Cretaceous North America, but the Deinosuchus' cry had a sobering effect on both of them as they quickly trotted off to find a relatively safer pasture, leaving behind a very hurt Tyrannosaurus.

"Okay, I did **not** see this coming," Nigel admitted to Susanne the vet, who just glared.

/ / /

 _Some time later…_

Some time later, Nigel was helping Susanne treat Matilda. The park's vet had treated tyrannosaurus before – more precisely, Matilda's brother Terrance, who had been mauled by his sister in the past, sometimes quite badly. Matilda's case, however, was different, as she required a cast on her broken ribs, and plenty of tranquilizers to keep her sedated as Suzanne, Nigel, and others treated her.

(The Smilodon cubs who still hanged around Suzanne and were actually interested in learning how a wounded T-Rex would taste like did not make the situation better, or easier. However, Bob and his people, kept them under relative control.)

"I did not see something like this coming, but I should've," Nigel told Suzanne. "In modern Africa, large herbivores get the better of lions and leopards and the like as often as otherwise, so it shouldn't be any different with dinosaurs. That said, I expected something like this from our Triceratops, not the hadrosaurs."

"Where are they now?" Suzanne asked tiredly, as their operation on Matilda ended. The T-Rex would recover – in time.

"Not far away from Theo and Theodora, actually," Nigel shrugged. "The two couples tolerate each other well enough. I also learned something about the Troodon in my journey: this is an intelligent, social carnivore – I suspect that our Troodon is hanging around the terror bird because it is both lonely and bored at the same time."

"And the terror bird?"

"I will have to go prehistoric South America, _again_ , to resolve that," Nigel shrugged. "Hopefully, this time, no formidable plant eaters will make an appearance."

Suzanne just shook her head and said nothing else.

End


End file.
